The present invention relates to a system for controlling the operation state of various types of terminal equipment involved in the point-of-sales (POS) system using a local area network (LAN).
The point-of-sales system (hereinafter abbreviated as POS system) has been used in department stores and supermarkets to control their sales data. The POS system comprises one or a plurality of terminal equipment such as electronic cash registers installed in one or multiple shop fronts, connected to a master equipment that may be of the same form as the terminal equipment. When commodities are sold at a shop front, sales data such as the name, quantity and unit price of each commodity and total sum of money are input in a terminal equipment. The input data is directly sent to the master equipment where the data are aggregated and processed in real time.
In the conventional POS system, all units of terminal equipment installed are turned ON or OFF simultaneously by an appropriate instruction data given from the master equipment. Alternatively an operator must turn ON or OFF each terminal equipment manually.
With the conventional terminal equipment control system, operation for turning ON or OFF the terminal equipment is very complicated. Besides, even for terminal equipment which is not presently used, it may be necessary to install personnel to turn OFF the terminal equipment.